The Mathematical Reason Most People Never "Make It"

The uncomfortable truth about effort, outcome, and the math that connects them all

The last few years, a new December tradition has emerged: Spotify Wrapped. The largest music streaming service packages a year’s worth of your listening data into a fun, shareable format that conveniently ignores the fact that this is just a glimpse of how much personalized data these tech companies actually have on you.

But that’s not what caught my attention this year.

I started noticing something in everyone’s top 10 artists. The same names kept appearing: Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, The Weeknd. Over and over again across different friend groups, different demographics, different music tastes.

So I did some digging.

Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. That’s insane.

Oh and this isn’t just a Spotify problem or even a music industry problem.

This is a pattern that shows up everywhere once you know what to look for

What Is Price’s Law?

In 1963, a physicist named Derek J. de Solla Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention.

He noticed something strange: the distribution of productivity wasn’t a bell curve as you’d expect… it wasn’t even close.

It followed a completely different mathematical pattern.

Price’s Law states that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output

• In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research

• On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation

Price discovered this while analyzing scientific citations. In any given field, a small fraction of researchers generated half of all cited papers. The rest still published, but their work barely got noticed.

The formula is simple: √n = your high performers, where n is the total population.

Oh, and it wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

In corporate America, Price’s Law shows up with eerie precision. Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.

Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and a few thousand other companies produce as much as the other 29,994,500 combined.

In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light. The Milky Way has roughly 100 billion stars, but 316,000 of them (0.0003%) generate half the luminosity. Most stars are dim, unremarkable red dwarfs.

A handful of blue giants blaze so bright they illuminate entire stellar neighborhoods. (Scientifically known as a Power Law distribution)

In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.

The list goes on and on. River systems, sales teams, Wikipedia editors, wealth distribution, anywhere you look, the square root does half the work.

And this is not a coincidence or rigged systems or unfair advantages (though those exist too).

This is just how complex systems work when skill, consistency, opportunity, and luck all compound over time.

And if you’re building a personal brand or a one-person business, understanding this law might literally save you.

Competence vs. Incompetence

Price’s Law violates our egalitarian instincts. We want to believe everyone contributes equally, that effort equals outcome, that hard work is the great equalizer, but reality is far from it.

competence scales linearly and incompetence scales exponentially

Competence is rarer than we pretend it is.

I’m not saying that people are lazy or stupid, but real competence, the kind that moves needles, ships products, and generates world-bending ideas, is the result of skill, consistency, opportunity, and yes, some luck, all compounding in the same direction.

Most people have one or two of those ingredients. The square root has all four.

This creates a weird psychological landscape:

For the high performers, there’s often imposter syndrome. “I’m not actually that good, I just got lucky.” Sometimes true! But Price’s Law suggests that if you’re consistently in that square root across multiple domains, luck isn’t the full story.

You might actually be cooking at a different level, and the isolation you feel—the sense that few people “get it”—is mathematically predictable.

There are fewer of you. Embrace your genius.

For everyone else, there’s the Dunning-Kruger trap. “I’m doing the work, why am I not seeing results?” Because doing “a work” and doing “the work” that matters are not the same thing.

Ninety percent of effort in any system is treading water. It’s necessary (sure systems need maintenance ), but it’s not what drives outcomes.

Price’s Law reveals that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity cannot coexist in complex systems.

Even if you give everyone the same resources, the same training, the same chance, outcomes will still stratify eventually.

Some people will compound their advantages. Most won’t.

Mathematics doesn’t give a fuck about fairness or ethics. Compounding systems create exponential distributions, that’s it.

And if you’re building a one-person business, or a personal brand, or anything where you are the system, this has immediate, practical consequences.

1. Content

Alex Hormozi says you need to do so much work that it would be impossible to lose. While I’m not big on hustle culture, there’s truth here that Price’s Law makes clear.

Let me use my own Substack as an example: In the last 8 months, I’ve posted about 30 newsletters, over 700 notes, and thousands of comments. In that time, only about 15 notes and 2 newsletters went “viral” and brought me an overwhelmingly large amount of my subscribers.

That’s 17 pieces out of 730+ total outputs—roughly 2.3%—driving the majority of my growth.

But I never would have found those 17 winners without posting the other 713.

If you’re creating content, √n of your posts will drive 50% of your results. If you publish 100 posts, 10 will matter.

If you publish 400, 20 will matter. The rest are essentially practice rounds.

The implication being that you cannot predict which pieces will hit before you publish them. If you could, you’d only publish winners.

But you can’t know which seed becomes the oak tree until you plant a lot of seeds.

So here’s the playbook:

1. Produce volume early. You need enough shots on goal to identify patterns.

2. Track everything. I mean everything. Which posts got shares? Which got replies? Which drove clicks, sign-ups, sales? Avoid the vanity metrics—look for business outcomes.

3. Identify your √n. After 50-100 pieces, patterns emerge. For me, it was long-form storytelling with a contrarian hook. For you, it might be tactical how-tos, personal vulnerability, or data-driven breakdowns. Find your √n.

4. Double down ruthlessly. Once you know what works, make more of that. Kill everything else. This feels wrong—it feels limiting—but Price’s Law says the other 90% of your content wasn’t mattering anyway. You’re just making peace with reality.

I now publish 70% less than I did a year ago. My engagement is up 4x.

2. Skills/Offer

You have dozens of skills. √n of them drive half your value in the marketplace.

For me, that’s probably three skills: writing clearly, connecting disparate ideas, and asking uncomfortable questions in consulting sessions.

Everything else I do—project management, graphic design, coding—is table stakes or delegable.

The reason why we spend so much time trying to be “well-rounded” is because we’ve been lied to.

The education system, the corporate ladder, the self-help industrial complex—they all sell the idea of balanced competence. “Work on your weaknesses!”

No.

Double down on your √n skills. Get so good at your two or three multiplier skills that you’re in the top 1% at the combination of those skills.

You don’t need to be the best writer in the world. You don’t need to be the best strategist. But if you’re top 10% at writing and top 10% at strategy, you’re suddenly top 1% at strategic writing.

That’s a great market position.

Price’s Law says most of your value comes from a few skills anyway so stop pretending otherwise.

3. Time Management

If you work 40 hours a week, about 6 of those hours actually matter. The other 34 are maintenance, “busywork,” meetings that could’ve been emails, and a whole lot of goofing around.

I started tracking my time last quarter, not in 15-minute increments (too granular in my opinion) but in 2-hour blocks.

I labeled each block: “high-leverage” (writing, strategy, client calls) or “low-leverage” (admin, email, tinkering).

I still struggle to keep this schedule 100%, but I genuinely think that this is the new meta.

Almost two decades ago, Tim Ferriss proposed a 4-hour work week. I think this is a bit far-fetched, especially for someone still building, but a 40-hour work week with guaranteed 6 hours of high-leverage, needle-moving activities is definitely doable.

The Paradox (And Why You Still Need to Do the Other 90%)

In an ideal world, we would all know the best moves to make at any given time, but that’s not how the world works.

You can’t know which 10 posts out of 100 will blow up without posting all 100. You can’t know which skills are your multipliers without trying a bunch of skills. You can’t know which relationships matter without meeting a lot of people.

It’s a game and we all have to play.

The early game is exploration. You’re planting seeds everywhere, seeing what grows. Price’s Law hasn’t kicked in yet because you don’t have enough data.

The middle game is identification. You’ve published 50 posts, launched 3 products, met 200 people. Patterns are emerging. “Oh, this is what works. Huh.” That’s your √n.

The late game is exploitation. You double down on the winners. You cut out the losers. You focus your energy towards the best bet. You let Price’s Law work for you instead of against you.

Most people never leave the early game. They keep exploring forever, mistaking activity for progress. “I published 300 posts this year!” I mean, that’s cool and all, but how many mattered?

Some people skip straight to the late game. They focus before they have any data. They niche down too early and commit to a strategy with a sample size of three. Then they’re confused when it doesn’t work out in their favor.

The paradox is you need both. Explore the noise until you have signal. Then exploit that.

So do the work. Publish the “bad” posts, take the “pointless” meetings, develop the “useless” skills. Because you really don’t know what’s useless until after the fact.

Compounding happens in the margins, in the weird micro-connections between the stuff that didn’t work and the stuff that did.

— kaguura